Anti-Allied Coalition of Nationalists

Through propaganda, agitation, the supply of firearms, and financial reward (or the promise of it), tireless German agents and operatives in Hamadan, Isfahan, Shiraz, Yazd, and Kerman were able to create a network that stretched from the Kurdish tribes of the Kermanshah to the Qashqa’is and Tangestani in Fars and to the Banu Ka‘b Arab tribes of southern Khuzestan. Most famous among these, Wilhelm Wassmuss, a free agent of the sort operating in Fars province who coordinated his efforts with the German Intelligence Bureau of the Orient (responsible for covert operations in the east) was able to mobilize, along with other German officers, the Qashqa’is of the Fars province and smaller tribes of southern Fars.

They fielded a sustained insurgency against the British and their Khamseh tribal allies. Von Kardroff, taking refuge with the Bakhtiyari and protected by Bibi Maryam, the influential sister of Sardar As‘ad, the chief of the tribe, fostered a momentary pro-German pact among the Bakhtiyari. Rudolf Nadolny, the chief of the Intelligence Bureau, helped mobilize the Sanjabis and other Kurds of Kermanshah into an effective force. Oskar von Niedermayer, a senior German agent, was active in Afghanistan even though Iran proved more fertile ground for German war efforts.

The German agents represented a new brand of covert operation that relied on dedication, knowledge of the terrain, military savvy, and the promise of large monetary reward. To facilitate war efforts in western Iran, the German treasury even distributed German marks with equivalents in Persian qeran printed on the banknotes. The proxy war fought in Iran relied on resources of modern German armaments that were crucial for the spread of firearms throughout the Iranian countryside. German gold—which was promised and at times spent lavishly—bought the notoriously shifting tribal loyalties only to an extent.

The war operation in Iran, Afghanistan, and the Persian Gulf gave the German agents an aura of heroism that contradicted the unfulfilled financial promises made to the khans of the collaborating tribes. A number of Iranian Germanophiles among intellectuals and poets of the period, including Mohammad Taqi Bahar, composed popular poems in support of Germany and Perso-German symbiosis. They even employed wandering dervishes to recite these poems in the mosques and bazaars of Isfahan and elsewhere.

Sayyed Ahmad Adib Pishavari, a reclusive scholar and poet originally from Peshawar, who nursed a deep grudge against British colonialism, composed numerous panegyrics in praise of Kaiser Wilhelm II. He also composed Qaysar-nameh (Book of kaiser), an epic poem of about five thousand verses in honor of the German emperor, in the style of the Shahnameh. By 1918, however, hopes for a German victory over the Allies fizzled, and with it the prospects of ending the Anglo-Russian hold over Iran. Later during the interwar period, German cultural symbiosis with Iran, underscored by archeological excavations and philological studies of shared Aryan roots, held powerful sway over the Iranian imagination.

Germanophilia vs. Anglophilia: Proxy Silent War in Persia